#responsive onboarding

by Manya

Anything, when explained fully enough, can go from a simple task to a monstrous ordeal, on par with solving the diophantine quintuple or justifying why Nickelback is still making albums. Let’s take the instructions you’d need to give a new user to explain how to put a dollop of ketchup on a pile of French fries:

First, select the packet of ketchup. (You may have to explain where the user would find this, how they would identify it, what to do if there aren’t packets readily available, and what to do in case there’s just one of those squeezey-tub dispensaries of ketchup).

Open the packet. Using one hand, hold the packet and with the other, try to rip the top corner off.

If you’ve already eaten a fry or two, your hands may be too greasy to accomplish this. You’ll attempt it anyway, hopelessly mangling the top of it.

Don’t use too much force here. That would tear the top too much, and could result in a spray of red condiment everywhere except for your fry basket.

Don’t use too little force. You’ll never get it open. These things are engineered to withstand natural disasters.

You should aim for an opening force of 32 PSI.

If you can’t get it open, use your teeth. Place the top corner of the packet firmly between your top and bottom front teeth, and using a hand, tear the packet away from your mouth. Spit out the plastic corner in a nearby waste bin.

Pour ketchup on your fries. Some users prefer to pour it all over their fries. Some prefer to pour a pile of pure ketchup on a nearby plate or napkin. Let your unique style shine!

Don’t pour too much — it’ll make the fry soggy and overly sweet, and you’ll run out of your packet too quickly, meaning you’ll have to repeat the previous steps all over again.

Don’t pour too little either. Fries without ketchup are sad.

You should aim for a 4:1 fry-to-ketchup ratio.

Eat fries. Don’t eat too many, you’ll feel bloated from all the salt.

Don’t eat too few. And really, isn’t it always too few?

You should aim to eat at a rate of 4-5 per minute.

We haven’t even explained to a user how to select ketchup for an at-home version of this procedure, or how to purchase the fries, or cleanup (hardware shutdown). And we certainly didn’t get into troubleshooting, like what to do if you get ketchup onto nearby objects like a white tablecloth or growling cat. But by this point, the user has started wondering why fries and ketchup ever seemed like a good idea and has been daydreaming about mustard and potato chips since step 4.

So if assembling the simplest (and most delicious) of snack foods can seem like a hassle when we explain it to someone new, what hope is there for bringing unfamiliar users onboard to service-oriented products with moving parts like dashboards, emails, alerts, and a support system? In the example above, we didn’t even get into best practices like chewing (32 chews before you swallow!), or fry selection (curly > waffle > shoestring) — how can we tell a new user not only how to do something, but also to do it in the best possible way, from the beginning?

The answer is we can’t. At least not if we want to make our users happy. Initially, every new piece of information about the product makes it seem that much more complicated. So what we’ve developed at Versa is something we call responsive onboarding, a process where the user’s behavior informs what product information we present, how, and when.

Instead of a big, all-encompassing onboarding process with listed steps, video demonstrations, and PDF tutorials, the only thing we make sure our new clients understand before they use the product is how they will most often interact with it at the highest level. For Featured Perspectives, this is “alert, write, publish.” For ketchup, it’s “open, pour, eat.”

After that, we let them loose. Based on a client’s use of the product, we’ll guide them in the areas of Featured Perspectives where they demonstrate insufficient initial understanding, and leave out explanations of processes that they clearly get. For example, one user might start with fantastic content for their perspectives, but might not know how integral the CTA link is to make that content actionable. In that case, we’d skip the “here’s how to write good content" and "here are our submission guidelines" and "here’s what readers want to be reading” spiels entirely, and solely give them tips around CTA links. 

With responsive onboarding, we’ve been able to cut out 63% of the features, how-to’s, and tips that we’d normally share well before the client ever published a Featured Perspective.

63%! Without a responsive process, that 63% would have been useless knowledge, no-duh moments, and glazed-over eyes that we dumped on the user, in turn making our product seem (at least) 63% more complicated.